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November 6 - November 11, 2020
for now at least, they still had the ineffable “it” that could otherwise be expressed only by dropping one’s trousers, ruler at the ready. Richard “Dick” French boasted of killing more bears
Nice transition lol
One of the pernicious obstacles to the growth of the party has been its commitment to following logic chains into whatever dark place they lead, regardless of social mores. That’s why, in one true sense, the philosophy is deeply ingrained with America’s founding principles but, in an equally true sense, still engenders earnest debates over whether consensual cannibalism should be legal.
And just like the founding fathers, they intended to father a new founding.
just as a rabies parasite can co-opt the brain of a much larger organism and force it to work against its own interests, the libertarians planned to apply just a bit of pressure in such a way that an entire town could be steered toward liberty.
It’s not clear whether, at this point, the Babiarzes fully understood that the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.
Like many Free Towners, Babiarz implied that it was grossly unfair for people to judge the Free Town Project by the views expressed on the Free Town Project website.
Ploszaj (it’s pronounced rarely) decided to hike a trail from Hardy Hill Road to the Pinnacle, a high peak that overlooks the valley in which Grafton is situated. Ploszaj (really, it’s pronounced “PLO-zhay”)
Lol
“Government isn’t ruining capitalism. Capitalism is ruining government. I think that’s kind of obvious,” he says. “If you take capitalism out of government you get simple public representation. If you take government out of capitalism, you get slavery.”
“What’s the endgame of capitalism, if not a big fat white man sitting on top of a pile of bloody bones with no one around him, crying because nobody’s around to make him a sandwich?”
It was as if some elder Cthulu god had been handed a wooden, barn-sized bowl of sacrificial chevre and cast it down, disgusted at the enormous mass of shit and dead goats mixed in with the living.
Now he stood on a bright hillside, birdsong washing over a long, sloping pasture where every detail spoke of care, and love, and order. A beautiful house towered over meticulously kept flowerbeds and fruiting apple trees. The tufted meadow was lush and neat, and Doughnut Lady’s tone was warm and soothing.
Oh god something hilariously awful is going to happen to this poor steer.
It was later reported that the acoustics of the peak carried his words to neighboring properties much better than to those who stood at the tower’s base.
They’d built a town with few taxes and little state involvement, where a man was free to build an epic, towering pulpit that, once scaled, rendered one nearly inaudible.
The state now considers Grafton a single, near-continuous block of bear habitat.
Rather, the low tax rate may have been a predictable outcome for a town that had, over the years, become a haven for miserable people.
In the judgment of the libertarians, the video documented a great success in the struggle to defend freedom.
This is all straight out of Trailer Park Boys.
Whenever a couple within the community split up, people took sides, framing the actions of the nonfavored spouse as statist.
But in fact, the idea that America’s undeveloped places are a pristine wilderness—a faithful echo of the prehistoric era—is pure myth. We can preserve an individual butterfly by pinning its corpse to a corkboard, but as naturalists like Bernd Heinrich note, we can never pin down anything so complex and dynamic as an ecosystem.
2019 study found that some wild black bears with access to sugary human foods (like doughnuts) are skipping seasonal hibernation; these bears also showed advanced aging at the cellular level.
Another logistical difficulty facing the survivalists is that most or all of them lack most or all of the survival skills they would need to get most or all of their food from the forest.
Many times I’ve heard that it’s dangerous to let bears get acclimated to people. I’ve never been told what now seems clear to me—that it’s at least equally dangerous to let people get acclimated to bears.
This underscored just how confusing Grafton’s people must have seemed to its problem-solving bears. Every house was a potential source of calories, but the people who inhabited them might flee, or sic a llama on them, or offer food, or throw firecrackers at their head. It was a lot to sort out.
Butt heads down a different path by defining colonialism as having three key features that persist into modernity.
All three characteristics, taken together, make this very serious theory of colonialism, proposed by Professor Butt, whole.
God damnit. I laughed.
While reading the research, I wondered whether Grafton’s libertarian colonizers would find the parasite’s actions to be an infringement on their freedoms or something more like consensual cannibalism, the unfortunate result of an active decision to expose oneself to cat poop.
Libertarianism is entirely built upon the appeal of exercising free choice to own a gun, marry indiscriminately, commit suicide, shoot bears, curse in polite society, or buy unhealthy amounts of soda in New York City. That appeal is decidedly less palpable if those choices are actually the product of a parasite.
What seemed clear was this: in a town that refused to allow the government to protect it from bears, vigilantism seemed the only option. Just as the libertarians wanted, it was every man, woman, and bear for themselves.
libertarians are by definition on the political fringe and hold positions that have rarely been tempered by the burden of leadership.
It’s not so much that state officials or the freedom community are wrong in their approach to the question of bear management. It’s just that the two approaches are totally incompatible, and neither side is in a position to effect change on the other side of the divide.
Keene had triple Grafton’s property tax rate, and restrictive zoning ordinances to boot, but apparently even libertarians were attracted to Keene’s amenities—a baseball team, tennis and basketball courts, a village green with a musical bandstand, playgrounds, the restored historic Colonial Theater, manicured parks, and a bustling downtown strip, all underpinned by robust, tax-supported municipal services.
those who had come to this patch of woods seeking the ultimate freedom were instead barricading themselves into a rudimentary fortress to attain some level of security that was not being provided by the government.
“In the last few years, a lot of them have just disappeared off the face of the Earth,” she said. “It’s like we did with the Moonies back in the ’80s. We chewed them up and spit them out. Grafton has a way of doing that.”
The layer of dust on her doorknob thickened infinitesimally as it added minuscule pieces of pollen from strange plants whose names Soule did not know, tiny bits of her own dead skin and hair intermingling with pieces of the home’s former occupants, pinpoint-sized arachnids that fed on the skin, and feces from those arachnids. A whole chaotic ecosystem in miniature rose up on her doorknob. One afternoon about a week after Soule came to Arizona, that little wilderness was thrown into turmoil. Even as fresh motes of lint and spiderweb descended from the sky, a vibration swept through, knocking
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In Phoenix, Soule has risen again.
God damnit
